The following report has been written by Jimmy Larsson and Oskar
Bodemyr as a bachelor's thesis in order to reach a bachelor's degree
in the subject of Computer Engineering. At the time of writing this
report, the most common compute device is the CPU. This report looks
at the possible usages of GPGPU and how one might instead use the GPU
for General Purpose Computations. The main question that the report
will face is the following:
Is it possible, using a
non-trivial parallel algorithm, to show that a GPU is better suited
to perform certain calculations than a CPU?
The
implementation of two test algorithms in order to study the basic
functions of GPGPU, followed by an implementation of a matrix-
multiplier provided data supporting the question of the report. The
data itself proves that certain algorithms such as the
matrix-multiplier of large amounts of data might take about 30
seconds to calculate on a CPU, while the same calculations can be
done on a GPU in less than half a second.